Fetching water on a college campus

I don’t think there is a place in this city where a crane is not visible. If you can only see one from where you are standing, you’ve found a pretty rare spot.

Almost always, it seems, the cranes are at the site of another new block of apartments. There are many dozens of apartment buildings in Yangzhou, many of them were built in the last three years, and many more are being built as I type this sentence.

They are building so many new apartments because they don’t build houses in Yangzhou. Houses aren’t efficient enough. They are an extravagance reserved for countries with fewer than 1.3 billion citizens.

Houses are so rare in Chinese cities that the locals here have trouble understanding how I could have grown up in a house that was in a city. To the Chinese, houses are only for the countryside, where there is actually enough land to build an entire building for just one family to live in.

It is incredible to think about how much of this city is brand new. I am typing this from an apartment on a college campus that is only a year old. Another college on our street is still half-finished.

They are building a giant apartment building across the street and a block down the road they are building another one. There is a large plot of cleared land between them, which will soon be the site of another major building project.

The main commercial street downtown, which leads to the most crowded and happening part of town, is only ten years old. That means the entire downtown shopping scene, and its multiple shopping centers and dozens of fashionable shops and restaurants, is less than ten years old.

They have since built an even newer street, leading to an even newer part of town. Everything on that street, which my local guide refers to as “the new city,” is less than three years old.

This type of growth is astonishing to someone who until a few weeks ago thought Bethesda, Maryland was growing pretty fast. I even assumed that America in general was growing pretty fast.

Living in China has a way of putting these things in perspective.

In an American city, you tend to notice when there is a major construction project in your neighborhood. If there is a 10-story building being built, it’s pretty safe to assume it’s the only construction site on that block. In Yangzhou, there’s a pretty good chance it isn’t.

But even with all of this growth, there are small things here and there that remind you that this is still China. You can still find very old men riding very old bicycles on even the newest of the city’s brand-new streets. Some of them drag large carriages behind their bicycles, hauling logs or farming equipment down a four- or six-lane road that wasn’t there in 1997.

Our brand-new school, just one year old, has strict limits on electricity in the dorms. Students can’t even use electric fans in their rooms, much less air conditioning.

And every day there is a steady stream of students carrying hot water from the water room back to their dorm rooms in a thermos. Even in a year-old technical college, there is no hot water in the brand new student dorms.

And lest you think the professors are living a modern life of luxury, most of them sleep in bunk-beds in shared dorm rooms. These are college professors with advanced degrees. If they lived in America, they might be turning down offers from the University of Wisconsin because the school doesn’t offer domestic partner benefits.